


Wolf

by personalized_radio



Category: 10th Kingdom (TV)
Genre: Adult Death too, Angst, Child Death, F/M, Murder, i mean its canon'verse!, idk i just wanted to write it?, thats about it, the way wolf says "Virginia", wolf-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-12 02:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20556632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/personalized_radio/pseuds/personalized_radio
Summary: He’s young when they take his parents. Not yet old enough to take the form of a human, though the pads of his paws have begun to flatten and his teeth have begun to blunt.





	Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> idk guys i found this and had totally forgot i wrote it in march?? that was forever ago 
> 
> anyway yees here we go thank u to jackie for telling me about this amazing show

He’s young when they take his parents. Not yet old enough to take the form of a human, though the pads of his paws have begun to flatten and his teeth have begun to blunt.

-

Time, you see, passes differently for wolves. They do not count in hours, seasons, days, years. They count by hunts, by feasts, by litters and heats. By moons. He is part of the second litter his mother has bore, his older brothers and sister scattered as they are wont to do when they reach the age of the Change.

They live in a small cottage, for a while, and that they stay is the mistake, he knows later. His mother eats the old grandma who lived there and takes the bed, his father the spot next to her. He and his siblings sleep in front of the warm fire, curled together, snoring and snuffling, legs kicking with imagined chases of playful prey. 

They go often from place to place and it is nice to stay, for once. The cottage, so far in the enchanted woods, seems so safe. He likes having a home. He and his sisters play in the yard while his father hunts and his mother watches them and his brothers play-fight to hone skills he has very little interest in. 

The strongest of his litter is already nearly a boy, with the body and head of a human and the tail and paws of a wolf. One of his sisters has the body of a wolf but the arms and legs of a human. Another is beginning to grow a distinctly flat face, growing more pale every morning break. He would be jealous, but he likes his body, too, and doesn’t look forward to the Change like his siblings do. His youngest brother and sister are like him in that nothing much of them has changed. They are still pups, not yet ready to Change, and very excited to continue as they are.

It is the little girl in red that brings about their doom. 

There are many little girls in red in the northern parts of the Second Kingdom, and he has always been taught to avoid them or eat them, if he can. 

The girl finds he and his sister when they are alone, taking turns pouncing on a butterfly just out of sight of the cottage.

When his eyes meet hers, he sees something change in them - sees the wide fear, smells the acrid scent, and then she is running away and he and his sister watch until long after she’s gone.

And then he returns to pouncing on butterflies, because he did not eat her and he did not run, but he found himself safe, after all.

-

They come at night. 

He is not the first to wake - that is his father, probably, and then his oldest brother and then his mother and then him. His sisters are slower, his youngest brother slowest of all.

He smells the fire, just as acrid as the red hooded girl’s fear.

“Run,” his father says, and none of them hesitate. This is not the first time they’ve been chased, but it is the scariest, the most foreboding. He has a feeling it will be important.

He is right, in the end, because it is the night his parents burn.

-

He loses his pack in the night. His oldest brother Changes, completely, and takes off with his youngest brother and sister under his long, gangly human arms, and his molting sister takes he and his other sister but he is the smallest, if not the youngest, and loses them in their haste to run. He could follow their smell, if he wanted, but he can still smell fire and hear angry screaming.

He doesn’t feel it until he tumbles over his own legs - no longer furry and stubby but long and pale under a thick pelt of _hair_. 

He tumbles head over _knees_, until he hits a tree hard enough to knock him out of his senses.

-

He wakes minutes later, naked and pale in the moonlight. Without his fur, he is cold. Without his pack, he is _alone_.

Unsteadily, scared, he slowly stands up and tries to make his way back to the cottage.

It is there, minutes later, that he finds his parents. 

Watches them tied to long stakes, moss and sticks and the thick stench of animal fat at their feet as they struggle.

His mother has always been the alpha and she struggles hardest, while his father stands and looks out at the crowd of humans yelling and shouting. They’re so _angry_, and it makes him want to tuck the tail he does not have anymore between his legs. 

Instead, his knees buckle together, so hard that they knock against each other. He’s _freezing_, he misses the fire inside their little cottage, and the warmth of his siblings and parents. His pack.

And then there’s _fire_ and he’s not cold anymore except for the bone-deep _chill_, the frozen terror as the fat and moss ignite under the torch of a man who will forever haunt his nightmares. 

“_Wolf!_” he hears shouted, and then echoed and echoed until it’s all he can hear, _wolf, wolf, wolf!_

His mother is overtaken by the flames first, her snarls of rage turning into loud, ear-splitting shrieks of agony. His father releases a single, mournful howl that seems to fill the entire forest and then the smoke is too thick to see either of them.

He can hear them, though, oh yes. He can hear his mother, screaming and screaming, and even his father, after not much longer.

And he sees the little girl in red, the hooded girl who he had seen the eyes of not twelve hours earlier. She’s watching in glee, torch in hand, shouting along with the rest of them, straw-blond hair in twin tails over her shoulders and hood down. 

-

His parents smell like cooked meat. He loves meat, but this smell turns his stomach. He has to leave, but he can’t move. He’s hidden, properly hidden, not an eye on him. The crowd slowly leaves as his mother’s cries finally trail off, as the smoke grows so thick and dark that it begins to cloud even the air feet away from the burning stakes. 

He can’t look away, but nor can he ignore the girl.

He is the last one, in the end, to see the fate of his parents. Burnt by humans.

Because they were wolves.

And he would be burnt, too, because _he_ is a wolf.

-

There is nothing left to untie from the stakes. Both his parents are far too burnt to attempt any sort of burial. He digs, though. Digs and digs and digs until he has a nice hole, and then he attempts anyway. When limbs crumble, when peeled skin flakes, when soot coats him with the ashes of his guardians, he is careful to replace it all within the hole. He buries them together, an unmarked grave except for the mark it’s left in his mind. He’ll remember. See it every time he closes his eyes.

Their nice cottage in the woods. His siblings, that he will never see again; his parents, that he will never see again; his fireplace - his - fire - no. No fire. 

He pats their resting place one final time and then decides that he needs clothes if he is to be a wolf who has Changed. There is no going back, not until the moon is closest to the kingdoms in the whole year, and there are many hunts until then.

-

He finds her by scent. He can’t forget her scent, acrid. 

She is sleeping peacefully in bed, a breadbasket on her bedside table, empty but for a single loaf and a thick slab of salted venison. 

He sneaks into her room through the open window, having snuck through the open village, through the open fields, because the wolves have been burnt and there is no danger left.

He makes sure she is awake before he rips her throat out with his blunted teeth, wants her to _know_ that it was him, hopes she recognizes his eyes the way that he will always remember hers. The hay of her hair turns bronze, and then brick.

He takes a tunic from her drawers and doesn’t mind wearing her long bloomers. They are short on him, come up inches above his ankles, but they will do. He takes her basket, and her red hood. 

He eats the venison, wonders if she has parents like he once had. He watches her body, waiting for her to somehow wake. She was not burnt at the stake, after all. 

She does not wake. The blood is strong, smells fresh and then begins to smell not so fresh. He wipes his hands and face on her red hood and throws it to the floor in disgust. Leaves through her window moments before dawn breaks and leaves the village just as the roosters begin to crow. -

-

He is the wolf. Wolf. He is Wolf. 

Nowhere is safe.

He is alone. But he has Changed.

-

And it is this way that he grows up. 

_Wolf_! One peasant or another shouts, as he grows, and the next thing he knows he’s running through town, through fields, through forests, through roads and oceans and mirrors, all in the hopes of escaping that fate. That _fate_. 

He has never looked at fire the same, can never forget the smell of it, nor that man’s face, nor that girl’s eyes. Not a moment of forgetting.

-

And then, one day, once upon a time, he goes through a mirror and sees a young girl and all of those things - the fire and the man’s face and the girl’s eyes and the scent of his parents’ charred remains as he buries them - all fades away. Love at first sight exists, it seems, even for a wolf such as him.

“Virgina,” he says, to taste the name, the sweetness, the savouriness, like bread and venison on a moonlit near-dawn, like finding an empty cottage and lighting a little flame and curling up by his lonesome to remember the days before he had Changed. 

“Virginia,” he says, to taste her scent, her frown, her forever-beauty, her _his_-ness. To hear how it sounds, like that of a far off howl that proves he is not completely alone, no matter how he feels, like that of a well-fed goat wandering from its herd, like that of life’s simple pleasures.

“Virginia,” he says to _say_.

“_Wolf_,” She sighs loudly and it is not in disgust, nor anger, nor hatred, nor with ill will toward all of him and his ilk. She takes his hand in her’s, squeezes once with a warning glance to _behave himself_ and he will, of course he will, anything for her. 

_Virginia_. 

The moon rises. 


End file.
